Nine years ago, I got (over)excited about working out the Forum Ranks (and posting stats for each rank). Now that I've become an administrator, I kind of can't really do that any more, but I've been wondering about what sort of forum ranks the various subforums at The Piazza might have for a while.

There is no system for this, so I thought I'd invent one, for my own amusement. I'm going to post it so that anyone nerdy enough to want to follow what I'm doing can have a look.

Replies are as important as topics (if not more so) so I'm going with a baseline of "ten replies per topic".

So, working from these rules I have set myself, I'm going to assign forum levels in this progression (rather than try to emulate XP from any edition of D&D):Forum Level|Minimum Topics|Minimum Posts
1|10|100
2|20|200
3|50|500
4|100|1,000
5|200|2,000
6|500|5,000
7|1,000|10,000
8|2,000|20,000
9|5,000|50,000
10|10,000|100,000

I will edit the above table, and add more levels, if I need to, but you should be able to work out the progression from that.

The nerdy "Forum Levels" will be posted in the next post (after I work them out).

I remember being very frustrated at another website back in the days for insisting that only the number of threads should be used in determining status of forums. That meant that forums with lots of long and interesting discussions was actually being punished for that. Glad we are not taking that route!

Havard wrote:I like that you are including both threads and total posts.

I remember being very frustrated at another website back in the days for insisting that only the number of threads should be used in determining status of forums. That meant that forums with lots of long and interesting discussions was actually being punished for that. Glad we are not taking that route!

Well it's only a fun thing anyway.

But if I was going to go on just one thing, I'd go on post count, rather than topic count.

Alzirus (0.11 ppd) might stay ahead of you for a while, but I think you will eventually catch him. But Mike Myler also has 0.29 ppd, so I think you will struggle to ever catch him.

Sarastro Magnifico has 0.21 ppd, so you will probably catch him eventually, but not too quickly.

Everyone else ahead of you on your page is also listed as 0.04 ppd, so if you want to prove you have no social life, and get onto page 6 of the leaderboard, you might be able to do it, assuming there are some slow people on page 6 that you and Mike Myler can steal the slots from.

Alzirus (0.11 ppd) might stay ahead of you for a while, but I think you will eventually catch him. But Mike Myler also has 0.29 ppd, so I think you will struggle to ever catch him.

Sarastro Magnifico has 0.21 ppd, so you will probably catch him eventually, but not too quickly.

Everyone else ahead of you on your page is also listed as 0.04 ppd, so if you want to prove you have no social life, and get onto page 6 of the leaderboard, you might be able to do it, assuming there are some slow people on page 6 that you and Mike Myler can steal the slots from.

I assume ppd is posts per day?

Yes, I have a couple of problems with pushing it up - one is that my main board to lurk at is GiantITP so I post there rather more often than here, and I am also more of a lurker than a poster
The other is that my work varies between "working flat out with no time to look at the PC with internet access" and "spend (nearly) all day on the internet because I have nothing to do" (our part of the project is effectively done so we spend most of our time waiting on others). Now this latter sounds good, but my work PC usually gets a network access error on these forums whenever I browse into a sub-forum, something it doesn't seem to do anywhere else. It's not a blocked website as that is a different message (found that out with Project Gutenberg), it just rarely works from my office. It could be something to do with the routing as the network portal is usually in Germany even though I work int he UK (which really messes up listening to the cricket on the BBC).

So yes, just because I don't spend my life posting on here doesn't mean I have a social life (one of the reasons why I grabbed a custom forum title last year) but I will see what I can do to rectify my miserly post count.

"If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it might just be a crow".

Alzirus (0.11 ppd) might stay ahead of you for a while, but I think you will eventually catch him. But Mike Myler also has 0.29 ppd, so I think you will struggle to ever catch him.

Sarastro Magnifico has 0.21 ppd, so you will probably catch him eventually, but not too quickly.

Everyone else ahead of you on your page is also listed as 0.04 ppd, so if you want to prove you have no social life, and get onto page 6 of the leaderboard, you might be able to do it, assuming there are some slow people on page 6 that you and Mike Myler can steal the slots from.

I assume ppd is posts per day?

Yes it is. I abbreviated it. The forum writes it in full.

Khedrac wrote:Yes, I have a couple of problems with pushing it up - one is that my main board to lurk at is GiantITP so I post there rather more often than here, and I am also more of a lurker than a poster

Giant in the Playground do some cool stuff. I don't blame you for hanging out over there. And there is nothing wrong with a bit of lurking. But it is nice when people delurk and you can have a chat with them.

Khedrac wrote:The other is that my work varies between "working flat out with no time to look at the PC with internet access" and "spend (nearly) all day on the internet because I have nothing to do" (our part of the project is effectively done so we spend most of our time waiting on others). Now this latter sounds good, but my work PC usually gets a network access error on these forums whenever I browse into a sub-forum, something it doesn't seem to do anywhere else. It's not a blocked website as that is a different message (found that out with Project Gutenberg), it just rarely works from my office. It could be something to do with the routing as the network portal is usually in Germany even though I work int he UK (which really messes up listening to the cricket on the BBC).

That's odd. I do occasionally get problems with a page on The Piazza loading, but if I immediately reload the page, it usually loads the second time.

There was a time, in the past, when I was using Internet Explorer and I kept loosing my posts. I use Firefox now, and have much less problems, although my work PC just went a bit weird with some other websites. (We swapped it out, as we got asked to test Windows 10, so that's fixed that problem.)

If you can try using a different browser, I would suggest giving that a go.

Khedrac wrote:So yes, just because I don't spend my life posting on here doesn't mean I have a social life (one of the reasons why I grabbed a custom forum title last year) but I will see what I can do to rectify my miserly post count.

I'm glad you got that title. Those custom titles are fun. But, seriously, it's more about cool ideas here, than post count. So if you have any great ideas, please do share them.

When I look at the memberlist I can see the date of joining and the total post count, but I don't see a "posts/day" column - is there one in a view I am missing, or are people dropping this into a spredhseet and adding a calculated formula?

"If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it might just be a crow".

Khedrac wrote:When I look at the memberlist I can see the date of joining and the total post count, but I don't see a "posts/day" column - is there one in a view I am missing, or are people dropping this into a spredhseet and adding a calculated formula?

It's calculated on the Profile Viewer page, found by clicking on the user's name.